It was for this Mediator, both divine and human, who should interpret the silence of God to man, who should be his Word to his creatures, that all humanity was sighing. Therefore it was that the first vague promise was a seed of hope, not only in the Jewish race, but in all other nations of the earth.
One of the earliest and most beautiful prophecies of the coming Messiah is from the heathen astrologer, Balaam:—
"Balaam the son of Beor saith,
The man whose eyes are open, saith,
He which heard the word of God
And knew the knowledge of the Most High,
Which saw the vision of the Almighty,
Falling into a trance and having his eyes open:
I shall see Him, but not now.
I shall behold Him, but not nigh.
There shall come a Star out of Jacob,
A sceptre shall rise out of Israel.
Out of Jacob shall come He that shall have dominion!"
Of late there has been discovered in Nineveh a large work on the system of magic of the Chaldee soothsayers, written on tiles of baked clay, in the "arrow-head" characters. Here we have a minute account, of the Chaldeans—the astrologers and the sorcerers spoken of in Daniel—with specimens of their liturgic forms and invocations. M. Lenormant, who has issued a minute account of this work with translations of many parts of it, gives an interesting account of the religious ideas of the Chaldees in the very earliest period of antiquity, as old or older than that of the soothsayer Balaam.
He says the supreme divinity, whom they called EA, was regarded as too remote and too vast to be approached by human prayer, and that he was to be known only through the medium of another divinity, his first-begotten Son, to whom is given a name signifying the Benefactor of Man. The prayers and ascriptions to this divinity remind us of the Old Testament addresses to the Messiah. The Hebrew poet says:—
"Of old hast thou laid the foundations of the earth,
And the heavens are the work of thy hands."
The ancient invocation upon the tiles of Nineveh addressed to the Mediator runs thus:—
"Great Lord of earth! King of all lands,
First-begotten Son of Ea,
Director of heaven and earth,
Most merciful among the gods,
Thou who restorest the dead to life."
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